“You’re leaving?”
“Mum’s driving me to the bus station.”
“How long will you be at camp?”
“I have not been informed.”
I sat up and swung my feet onto the cool floorboards. I put my arm around her bony shoulder. I was willing to forgive her for putting me in Birch’s fierce path. She’d probably had no idea how he would react. “It’s been great getting to know you,” I said.
“I’m not dying,” she said and laughed, planting a kiss on my cheek. She sprang up from the bed and jumped onto a sleeping Ev, who groaned in complaint.
“Good-bye, old bat,” the little sister teased. “Nice of you to come home.” Then she bounded out of the room, blowing me a kiss from the doorway.
John’s truck pulled up soon thereafter, sooner than I expected. I waved to him from the kitchen as he made a beeline for the bedroom to rouse Ev. The door closed behind him. Abby sought me out in the kitchen, her chocolate eyes urging me to sneak her a bit of leftover chicken. Grateful, she licked my hand and trotted back out onto the porch.
I picked at my bowl of oatmeal and pretended to read Paradise Lost. But Lucifer’s soliloquies offered no distraction. I allowed my mind to think about what I knew, and if it was right to tell. Would it make any real difference for John and Ev to know they were siblings? They had already gotten married. They had a baby on the way and were planning to move across the country to a place where they knew no one else. Was it just my selfish curiosity, my hunger to know what they would say and do once I said those words, that made me want to tell them? Or was it worse than that? I wanted Ev to myself, didn’t I? Didn’t I hope that this revelation might send John away? That, when he went away, things would go back to the way they’d been at the beginning of the summer?
Then again, maybe it was crueler to keep the secret, to withhold something so earth-shattering as the truth of someone’s origins from him, origins he deserved to know. Surely John’s paternity was why his mother detested Ev. If I didn’t tell him, Mrs. LaChance would only make their lives miserable, trying to drive Ev away.
I would have wanted to know.
Or at least that’s what I told myself.
My oatmeal was cold when John emerged from the bedroom. He poured himself half a cup of coffee, which he drank in one gulp, spilling a bit down the front of his red flannel shirt. He took in my pajamas. “You want a ride or not?” He whistled to the dog.
We barreled out of Winloch in silence, not because there was nothing to say but, at least on my end, because there was too much. My mind raced as we accelerated over the deeply pitted road, past the places I had come to know so well. First Bittersweet, with a sleeping Ev inside, disappeared behind a curve in the rearview window. We turned past the Dining Hall, empty but for Masha’s constant watch. Then sped beyond the trio of cottages belonging to Athol, Banning, and Galway. As we revved past each well-worn building, I bid the place a kind of good-bye. I would be returning with a new perspective on things: I would have told John, or I wouldn’t. I would have called my mother, or I wouldn’t. Not to speak was as much a choice as its opposite.
We skidded around the curve where John and Ev had discovered me two nights before, and he cleared his throat as though the memory of me standing before his truck had jostled him.
“So California, huh?” I asked.
“I’ve got a friend out there. Does contracting. Going to help me with a job.”
I nodded, not saying any of the skeptical things racing through my mind—she’ll leave you in a week, you aren’t prepared to be parents, she’s your sister for fuck’s sake, why on earth would you bring your hateful mother along—and on the last count, at least, he seemed to read my mind, because as we passed the turnoff for his mother’s cottage—speeding past it even faster than we had anything else—he said, “My mother’s going to come around.”
“She doesn’t seem to like Ev much,” I pressed.
“Yeah, well, she worked for the Winslows for a long time. She doesn’t want to see me hurt.”
“Or she knows something.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
We burst from the woods, startling the goldfinches. They lifted up from the meadow and sped north, like a yellow arrow. “What if she kept a secret, and the secret was meant to keep you safe, but now she can’t keep it anymore because—”
John slammed on the brakes, and the cab swung forward, then back. Our heads bumped the backs of our seats. I craned against my seat belt to see the animal in our path, the reason we had stopped, but there was nothing there. Instead, John was staring me down.
“Ow.” I rubbed the back of my head, looking in the rearview mirror to see if Abby was all right. She was gamely righting herself.
“I don’t like it when people beat around the bush,” he replied.
“I’m not—”
“What do you know?” he pressed.
“I don’t know anything.”
“May, I’m not an idiot. The Winslows have their dramas, but as far as I know we LaChances have managed to stay above all that. So if you know something about my mother, now’s your chance.”
I was losing my nerve. “John,” I said warmly, gesturing to the road, “I just want to call my mom.”
“And I don’t want Ev to leave here with any doubts. I’m not letting you get out of this truck until you tell me what you know. Because if you don’t tell me, you’ll tell her.” He shook his head. “They hate each other enough as it is. I’m not pouring lighter fluid on that bonfire.”
The chirruping finches had come back to rest on the reeds gently rustling in the breeze off the lake. The sun was warm.
“You don’t want to know,” I said. My eyes began to blur.
“You don’t tell me, I’ll find out. I promise you that. I’ll find out the truth.”
Ever since I had suspected, then known, the truth of John’s paternity, I had imagined telling him, but never what the words would be. In my imaginings, I had had the papers with me, spreading them across the seats, and I had taken him through every step—through Kitty’s journal, and the entry naming P., and the calendars, and the research—so that, by the final if, he could draw his own conclusions. He’d be the one to declare the truth, and I’d be free of my terrible secret, but I wouldn’t have to say it.
But in that moment, in that car, it was just as it had been with Daniel, in the river. Just as startling and clear: I was being asked to be the darkness.
The answer.
The executioner.
The one who did what no one else was brave enough to do.
“John,” I said, “Genevra is your sister.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Waiting
I thought he was going to hit me, but his hand sailed by and punched open the passenger door. Not a word, not a look. I stepped down, he slammed the door closed and sped off, away from me and Winloch, sending up a cloud of brown dust. Once it settled, all that was left of him was the distant roaring of the motor and Abby’s incredulous bark.
I followed on foot. Not because I wanted to catch up but because to go back into Winloch just then seemed an impossibility, and the road led only two ways. I didn’t blame John for leaving me—I knew I deserved it. Just as it had been with Daniel, I would accept my fate. If I must be blamed, I must, but I believed now, from the vantage point of having told, that it had been the only thing to do. As I walked, the memory of Galway’s body—the vividness of his limbs, the points of his hips, the succulence of his lips—swam back into focus. I trained my mind on the minutiae of our lovemaking, how it had felt, and tasted, and, in doing so, did not allow myself to veer off track and into the less appealing realms of his marriage, or John and Ev’s future, or the family he came from—Birch, Tilde, CeCe, Indo—and the secrets they kept.
Not a car passed me, and I relished the country route on my own, dreaming it would go on for miles. Thanks to Lu, I knew this world well, and I admired the Queen Anne’s lace and chicory linin
g the gravel road, the familiar, identifiable chirp of the nuthatch. I felt my arms growing tanner in the sun and relished the sweat on my brow. I suppose I knew that to meet civilization again would be eventually, inevitably, to meet the consequences of my actions, so I was disappointed when the gravel gave way to macadam, and when I rounded the final corner to glimpse the corner store.
I had walked nearly six miles, ostensibly to call my mother, but as I drew closer to the telephone box, I wanted less and less to hear her voice. All this time I had planned to tell her I was coming home, but, as my steps carried me along, I realized I didn’t want to. To do so would have been a gesture left over from some long-ago self who needed someone to tell her who to be. The daughter Doris Dagmar had spoken to back in June, dependent, repentant Mabel Dagmar, no longer existed. And I was glad of it. Liberated. I was a maker. Controller of destinies. If I had to leave, I’d cut my own way out.
I went inside and bought a box of red licorice. Then I turned around and walked home.
Ev glanced up from her book when I came in. “Where’s John?” she asked. I hadn’t forgotten about him; no, the vision of his hand punching open the door was seared into my mind, but the long walk in the sun had done its trick of making the morning’s conversation in his truck feel distant. I hadn’t prepared myself for her inevitable question.
“Oh,” I said, taking a moment to gather my lie, “he dropped me off.”
She craned her neck toward the driveway.
“At the store.”
“He made you walk home? That’s six miles!”
“I’m going for a dip. You want to join me?” But we both knew she would say no.
Without Lu and Galway, with my knowledge now passed along to John, Winloch seemed empty, almost as though it were a forgotten place and Ev and I, once again, its only inhabitants.
We made collages. Not of the families we wanted, or the families we had, but for each of the mainstays at Winloch.
Indo: purple flowers, hats, galoshes, box collections, all crammed into one small piece of paper.
Birch: straight lines, a smoldering cigar, a sailboat.
John: Ev’s sketch of his muscled back, set against a photograph ripped from a bikini catalog, so that it appeared John was sitting at the edge of an imaginary cliff face, looking out over a Tahitian sunset.
Melancholy settled over us. We must have eaten, we must have spoken, but all I can recall is the solitude of that night when it finally came—the crickets, the wheedling bats.
We were both waiting for John.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Widow
At six the next morning, Ev awoke me. She was fully dressed. Her drawers were open and empty. Far in the distance, I could hear the insistent barking of a dog.
“Are you leaving?” I croaked.
“John was supposed to be here an hour ago.”
I sat up. She sat down.
“Did he say anything?” she asked.
“About what?”
“When he left you at the store. It doesn’t seem like him. Was he distracted? Did something happen?”
My pulse raced. “We were talking about his mother.”
“I knew it,” she said, as her lovely brow furrowed. “Today was supposed to be the day. They were picking me up before sunrise.”
“You were going to leave without saying good-bye?”
Her glower turned into an indulgent smile. “You’re a goose.”
But I knew she’d planned to slip off. “Maybe they’ll still come,” I said finally.
She shook her head. “Sun’s up.”
“Tomorrow then.”
“What did he say? About his mother?”
“Just …” I sighed. “I honestly can’t remember. He wants you two to get along.”
“It’s so strange he didn’t stop by last night. It’s not like him.”
My heart was still pounding. I hadn’t expected to tell him Ev was his sister and have life just go on as usual, had I? The truth had consequences. I hadn’t wanted Ev to leave. But seeing her like this, worried, knowing that if she knew the truth she’d be destroyed, I found myself wishing I could go back. Still, if he didn’t come, she’d stay. And I could stay with her.
“Get up,” she said, slapping my legs, pulling a pair of my cold jeans from the floor. In the distance, the dog’s bark was relentless. “You’re coming with me.”
How can I describe my state of mind as Ev and I picked our way through the Winloch woods?
Safety at the weight of Ev’s hand in mine.
Self-assurance that I had done the right thing in telling John—if I’d kept my mouth shut and they’d taken his mother with them to California, the truth would have come out anyway.
Apprehension about John’s reaction to my presence—would he rail, or weep, or curse?
Relief at the possibility that he might have left her to me forever.
Ev and I hardly spoke as we made our way through the forest. The dog had not stopped barking—the persistent sound peppered the quiet morning air, disturbing the natural order of things. The light dappling through the pines was thin. I squeezed Ev’s hand.
We passed into the clearing where I had met the doe, but she wasn’t waiting for us. We cut back into the forest and scrambled up a slope of mossy rocks. Occasionally the road peeked through the trees, but no one drove on it. We were alone.
“Does that sound like Abby?” I asked, as the barking got louder. We were close enough to hear that the dog was tired. There was a crack in its voice.
Ev shook her head.
“Maybe his mother was sick in the night,” I said. I couldn’t help expanding the story of my innocence, even though I knew all it would take was one explanation from John, and Ev would know what I’d done. Still, I thought, there must be a way out of her knowing I’d been the messenger.
We crept up a final rock, then had to cut back down its ridge to avoid a twenty-foot drop. From our height, we had the advantage of a view over Mrs. LaChance’s roofline. As far as I could make out, John’s Ford wasn’t parked in the driveway. The dog was still barking, and the sound was coming from the house. It was Abby. No matter what Ev said, I knew that bark was Abby’s.
We scrambled down a last, wiggly boulder, only thirty steps from John’s mother’s door.
“Where’s Aggie’s car?” I whispered.
“John gave her today off so she wouldn’t know we were leaving.”
Every footfall, every pop of a broken branch, every crunch of leaf cover, seemed to ricochet between the rock face behind us and the cottage before us. We had no way of knowing what was waiting inside, but, even today, I contend I could feel it as I stepped into its vapor; the air around us turned cold and sad.
“John?” Ev asked boldly. At the sound of us, Abby’s bark turned more insistent. The dog whined. Her distress was coming from underneath the porch, I was sure of it, and I tugged Ev’s arm in that direction, but she pulled me toward the cottage door. The screen was in place, but the wooden door was open, as though someone had stepped inside only a moment before.
“Ev,” I warned, but she opened the screen door and called John’s name again.
“Mrs. LaChance?” I said meekly, following Ev inside.
“He wouldn’t leave her here alone.”
It’s hard to remember, after all the questions, after replaying what was where it was supposed to be, and what was out of place, after the shock of the discovery, and Ev’s mouth like an O, what those moments were like before we found her.
Were we afraid?
We walked through the living room and onto the screen porch. John’s mother was sitting in her wheelchair, her back to us. I can remember thinking her head was at a funny angle. Ev was a half step in front of me.
“Mrs. LaChance?” she whispered.
No response.
Ev placed her hand on the woman’s shoulder, turning her toward us. Then Ev’s hand sprang back. I watched it recoil, and my eyes found their way up to Ev’s
face, to her horrified expression, and then down again, scanning over the water view, to the death mask of Pauline LaChance.
The bruises around her neck showed exactly how the life had been squeezed from her.
“Oh my god,” Ev bleated, backing up, as I stood there, frozen. Directly below the floorboards we were standing on, I was aware of the sound of an animal crying, barking, trying to break free. The sound had been going on for a long time, but the buzz in my ears had drowned it out.
I turned. I saw the porch door behind Ev, hanging off its hinges. I pointed. She bolted out the door: “John?” she hollered. I followed her.
Abby’s bark was loud outside. Ev took off down the trail, but I called to the dog, and she answered me. I crouched to look below the porch and saw, through the cracks in the boards, that she was trapped under the steps—someone had placed an old door in front of the opening she usually used. She was frantic, scraping at the barricade, and I realized her paws were bleeding.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said shakily, trying to move the heavy door myself. I could only lift it a little, so I used all my weight to push it aside and managed, after the third try, to make a gap big enough for Abby to squeeze out. She didn’t stop to thank me or take comfort. Instead, she shot off down the cliff trail, straight after Ev.
Out onto the trail I sprinted, clipping at Ev’s heels. We cut back and forth along the switchbacks. Somewhere ahead of us, where the trail met the air, Abby had started barking again. We raced to catch up.
We came abruptly onto the point. I suppose we both believed that John would be standing there. That time was of the essence. That there was logic, and explanation, and that the end of the cliff held it all.
But it was just air above us. Below us, water. Out to the horizon, nothing but blue. Ev began to speak, but the words couldn’t form themselves. They were like tumbling rocks, too heavy, too full of their own momentum to make sense, impossible to understand over Abby, whimpering and whining, her paws coming dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, stones slipping from underneath her bloody nails and onto the rocks far below.
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